Chapter 9
I spent my teaching career as a physicist, and my biology is a little weak, but the little I do know about evolution is enough to make me wonder, quite often, just what the various elements of my personal DNA are doing still dogpaddling around the gene pool after all these eons of natural selection. Let's take a little inventory, keeping in mind that reproductive success is supposed to be the criterion for continued membership in the Kromosome Klub. What you've got here are bald genes, skinny genes, and nearsighted genes; along with an absence of genes that might code for athleticism, for chiseled good looks, for unusual intelligence, musical or other artistic talent, personal charisma, sense of style in dress or behavior, self-confidence, aggressiveness, physical vitality, taste for predation. You've got genes for average height, irises of an indefinable shade somewhere between brown and beige, mousy hair (and not much of it, as noted above), narrow shoulders, knobby knees, wrinkly skin now beginning to hang loose when I do my gradually decreasing number of daily pushups. . . well, why go on?
Assuming I'm not just some kind of changeling, in which case all evolutionary bets are off, the question here has to be: What in the world were the ancestral females thinking of when they allowed my predecessors access to their precious eggs? Will this one give me beautiful children? No. Will he protect me from predators? Only if they're rodent-sized or smaller. Will he defend my chastity (assuming I want it defended) from all the gorillas out there? Look at those pipestem arms, those asparagus-stalk legs. Will he be a good provider? Doubtful, although he might at least be sneaky enough to squirrel away a few tasty grubs here and there. He's not much good at cave painting or beating on the hollow log. What then? Here's my current thinking.
Your TV screen, as I had noted even before Leilah left and I started spending more time than I wanted to on the couch watching sports, is running wild with commercials for drugs designed to stiffen the penises of America. Ciagra, Vitalis, guys throwing strikes with big balls through tight openings and leering at store windows full of lingerie while the “partner” (always female and highly attractive) stands by with a knowing and contented smile, what Leilah used to call a well-fucked look, back in the era of our relationship when she had one herself. I suppose it’s a commonplace by now, but if you believe the ads, American males are suffering from a collective limp dick. Maybe there really is some connection with the 300 million guns we own and our lately very aggressive foreign policy. The proliferating symbols are too obvious to need listing.
The good-looking dudes in the ads are always fairly young, 30s I’d say, or at the most beginning to gray attractively — let’s say 40s or early 50s. Their partners are always beautiful and, though wholesome-looking, obviously more than willing. I used to ask myself, back in the days when erections were a dime a dozen, what’s these guys’ problem? And are there really so many of them concerned about genital rigidity, or is it just that the profit margin on penile encouragement is so high that the pharmaceutical companies only need to sell those pills to a few dozen anxious men to make themselves even wealthier than they already are from selling overpriced mood enhancers? For a lot of men, I suspect, the mere mention of what is now known as erectile dysfunction is enough to produce the phenomenon, which of course may be just what the drug pushers have in mind. For me, on the other hand, there has never been any particular problem in that area. Not that, as I cross the bar into my 60s, I haven't noticed a certain abstraction seeping into the picture, a slight fraying at the fringes of my personal erotic tapestry. I'm not quite as easily fooled by my own hormones as I was at age 14.
Mind you, I don't see this phenomenon – sexual interest extended superfluously into old age– as representing any great pointer on the dial of masculinity. In fact, it might be quite the opposite. That's where the Ducelis Evolutionary Strategy comes into play. Here it is: The conventional studs, having advertised their maleness and fulfilled the strictly biological imperative by pairing off – or even, in the old days, compiling a harem – and reproducing, are now finding that they’d rather hang out on the couch with their pals, loading carloads of trans fats onto their beltlines and watching even bigger studs smash into each other like locomotives, than spend the 15 or 20 minutes that might be required to heat up their wives. Besides which, they’re kind of tired from battling each other in the bearpits of commerce, the old dragon’s not quite as fiery as it used to be and, what the hell, it’s less demanding to watch Tiger Woods whacking his balls around than to do anything with their own.
Meanwhile, for their frustrated wives and “partners”, waiting in the wings and still hungry could be someone like me, no longer young, bald but sensitive, skinny but still motile, sagging pectorals but eyes crinkly with maturity, wisdom, and wry understanding, an appreciation for the varieties of Koigu yarn, and gonads that seem gratifyingly interested in their no longer exactly young bodies. This might be a recipe for at least occasional procreation, if not for demographic domination. Enough to keep things going at least. That's all I'm saying.
In my life, which is now beginning to be a long one, I have “done” the following drugs, here listed in the approximate chronological order in which I first knowingly took them (or they were given to me) with the intent of altering my mental state:
aspirin
caffeine
tea
Coca-Cola®
coffee
No-Doz®
alcohol
sex
marijuana
hashish
Librium
Valium
cocaine
Quaaludes
chocolate
sugar
basketball
ibuprofen
Compoz
Benadryl
Sudafed
Tylenol with codeine
Vicodin
You may raise your eyebrows at some of these, like aspirin, ibuprofen, or Compoz; but I maintain that the lifting of a headache has major mood-enhancing effects, and a good night's sleep is for us insomniacs a jewel beyond compare. I've tried quite a few of the items on this list in combination: for example, alcohol and sex; marijuana and sex; alcohol, marijuana, and sex; Quaaludes and sex (that was sort of the point of Quaaludes, as I understood it); chocolate and sex; Sudafed and basketball. The combination of alcohol, Quaaludes, and sex was not a successful one for me.
I suppose it looks like a long list; but I doubt that the days, or even parts of days, of inebriation in my life, if totaled up, would come to more than maybe a couple of dozen out of some 22,000 so far. I now avoid nearly everything on that list, with the exception of caffeine and some of the food products (I'm including alcohol in that category, because I don't drink to drink) and the occasional hit of ibuprofen. Plus my doctor has advised a baby aspirin a day, to fend off strokes. All things considered, caffeine, with its pleasant neap tide of optimism, is probably the best of them, provided that I'm able to limit my intake enough not to become overly habituated.
Of the others, only sex has been at all important in my life and, along with Victor Carogna's shooting lessons, it plays a leading role in this particular tale. You probably noticed that it occurs prominently in my list of combination agents. That's because of all of them sex has been the most gripping, and still is, even though since retirement (is it a coincidence?) I've begun to get little hints that it's in the process of slipping away from me, as a physical activity if not a mental one. I'm not enough of a biochemist to know the particular suite of reagents that produces the physical changes and mood elevation that surround sex, along with the spectacular focusing of my normally fuzzy intention. Whatever it is, old age has not much dimmed its plumage, and it continues to ride my shoulder almost all the time, bright-eyed, like an annoyingly garrulous parrot.
Because of that, I suppose I could make a case for blaming the whole mess on Leilah if I were so inclined, and sometimes I am. Because she left me alone, a newly retired guy, unadapted to my new circumstances and
with too much time on my hands. Because even before she left me, she pretty much cut off my favorite drug, and then later transferred what I had considered my personal supply to a birdwatcher with a 4-wheel drive truck. Because she created in me a need for revenge, or turnabout, whatever you want to call it. And because she introduced me to her knitting group, which included, along with a little old lady and the right-wing maniac who taught me how to shoot a handgun, a number of attractive young women, two of whom lived in this very building, although both of them already had boyfriends. The behavior of one of those two was unimpeachable.